


and your eyes look like coming home

by Clones_and_gallifrey



Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, First Kiss, I changed the summary because I just didn't like it, Idiots in Love, Love Confessions, Roommates, totally not projecting my own fears about adulthood here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 22:11:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11860656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clones_and_gallifrey/pseuds/Clones_and_gallifrey
Summary: It's the Tuesday before MJ’s very last final as a college undergrad, and Peter has never been more in love with her.





	and your eyes look like coming home

**Author's Note:**

> Alternatively titled: I saw spiderman homecoming and these nerds wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote something about them.

It's the Tuesday before MJ’s very last final as a college undergrad, and Peter has never been more in love with her. He’s standing in the doorway of their living room and watching her, hair piled on top of her head, loose strands cascading around her face, eyes scrunched shut, lips moving wordlessly. He thinks she's probably reciting pages from one of the textbooks spread out in front of her, and wonders when she last ate or slept.

Peter’s standing in his pyjamas, freshly back from patrolling Cambridge for one of the last times before he moves back to New York. Before he's officially a college graduate. It's scary, standing on the precipice of official adulthood like this, this jumping into the unknown. He's stopped muggings and armed robberies, fought alongside the avengers and helped to defeat Thanos, but this, leaving behind everything here, leaving behind being a kid once and for all, is a different brand of terrifying.

The thing that's making it all a little easier is the knowledge that MJ will be there too. She's going to grad school back in New York, and seeing as they share an apartment now, it makes sense for them to keep doing so. They tell each other - tell themselves - that it's for convenience purposes; they _know_ they like living together. Peter knows not to steal MJ’s food from the fridge, MJ knows that Peter is spiderman. They help each other study and they watch movies together on Sunday evenings and Peter made a playlist for them to clean the apartment to. It wouldn't make sense to move in with different people, to disturb the happy little bubble they've built.

“Are you just going to stand there all night?” MJ growls from the couch, eyes still closed, legs crossed in front of her.

Peter jumps, cheeks reddening a little. “No. I was just, uh-” Peter looks around, trying to pick an excuse from thin air.

“You could come over here and quiz me,” MJ holds out a pack of flashcards, and Peter is momentarily transported back to being sixteen, to sitting on his bunk bed with Ned and MJ and going through stacks of academic decathlon questions.

Peter wonders if that's when he started to fall in love with her. He knew he had a crush on her sure, but the love thing happened slowly. So slowly that he didn't notice until years later, until he was sitting across from her over a plate of charred pancakes and there was syrup on her nose. Until he caught himself wondering what he'd do without her in his life.

“It's one a.m.” Peter points out, taking the cards and sitting beside MJ on their old worn couch.

MJ turns to him, opening her eyes and glaring until he can't bite back a smile any more. He reaches for her half empty bottle of orange juice and takes a mouthful.

“Ok, ok,” he shuffles the cards. “I was just saying. Your final starts in like seven hours. The coffee place across the street is gonna go out of business when we move back to New York,” he adds, thinking about all of their late night study sessions and subsequent difficult mornings.

“There was a guy named Alfred Herpin who lived in New Jersey and claimed he went ninety years without sleep,” MJ says, pushing loose strands of hair away from her face. “I think he's my hero.”

“I thought spiderman was your hero?” Peter jokes, dodging as she tries to punch him in the arm. He tears his eyes from her, from the dark circles under her own eyes, from her chapped lips, from the curve of her nose. Peter shuffles back on the couch, and launches into the questions.

He's going to miss this couch. It came with the apartment, and half of his best memories in it have happened right here. Like the first weekend that Ned came to visit them from New York and they marathoned all of the Star Wars movies, or when Mr Stark called him and offered him an actual, true-to-the-name, Stark internship for after he graduates. But mostly they include MJ. They include celebrating with her and her friends when she found out that she got accepted to her dream grad school, or when he spent half of her birthday baking a questionable cake, and she blew the candles out right here and told him that it was ‘decent’, which Peter knows is high praise from MJ. Peter’s pretty sure his cooking skills are on a par with his aunt’s.

More recently, Peter and MJ have been falling asleep right here on the couch. Peter isn't sure why or how it started happening, all he knows is that one Friday, a month or so ago, they were studying together, both trying their hardest to stop yawning every two seconds, and then MJ’s head was hitting Peter’s shoulder. It's not like that's never happened before, it's just that every time it does, Peter thinks he might have a heart attack. Usually, MJ moves away after a few minutes, shifting into a more comfortable position, but that time her voice had grown quieter, breathing steadier, and then somehow it was light outside and Peter found himself untangling himself from MJ’s limbs.

It's happened three times since then, and they never talk about it. Peter’s scared to ask, because MJ, tied with Ned, is his best friend in the world, and he's not going to be stupid and risk ruining that. Maybe she keeps falling asleep on him by accident, or maybe she gets lonely. He isn't objecting. But it's probably some actual form of torture, waking up to find the girl you're in love with sleeping right beside you, arms thrown around each other. Every time, he wants to lean down and kiss her. Every time, he thinks about how MJ is probably going to meet some ridiculous, perfect-for-her guy any day now, and he’ll listen to her telling him how in love she is. He’ll attend their wedding and listen to the speeches and wonder if he should have told her how he felt. But she’ll be happy, so he’ll be happy for her.

Peter reaches the end of the first stack of flashcards, which he's only been channeling half of his attention into, the other half caught up in a couch related musings, and looks back up at MJ. She's wearing flannel pyjamas and a red sweater that he knows for a fact she stole from his bedroom. It's spiderman red, and there's a small mark on one of the sleeves where he almost caught it on fire trying to make dinner last week.

He wants to kiss her. And sure, that's a default part of every day now, wanting to kiss Michelle, but when he's sitting next to her and she looks like this, elbows resting on her knees, head resting on her hands, sleepy and smart and beautiful, he’s seconds away from asking her if he can kiss her right now.

“I'll pass, right?” She asks, her voice tinged with unfamiliar uncertainty, a little hoarse from lack of sleep.

“You just answered every one of these questions correctly. I think you've got this,” he pokes her hand with the laminated edges of the cards and MJ tugs them from his grip.

They sit in silence for a minute, listening as it starts to rain outside, a steady pattering on the large windows.

“I can't believe we’re not gonna live here anymore,” MJ muses, looking around at their surroundings.

The apartment is mostly open plan, a large proportion of the surfaces taken up with plants or books or cups. MJ’s sketchbook is overflowing on the kitchen table, open to a recent quick drawing of Peter, and there are polaroid pictures of the two of them stuck to the fridge. He thanks his lucky stars that they'll be living together in New York too.

“We’ll find somewhere even better to live next year,” Peter promises. “Did you look at those links May sent through yet?”

“Mmhmm,” MJ nods, eyes trained on the flash cards again. “The second one was nice.”

“The one with the blue fire escape?”

“Could put the plants on it.” MJ puts the cards down, flips through the pages in the fattest textbook in front of her, in search of something.

“Should we get a cat?” Peter asks, just because he thinks it could be cool to have a cat. But then he panics because he's remembering the Friends episode where Ross’ Geller freaks out about getting a cat because it's like some big sign of commitment.

But, “a cat could be cool,” MJ says, finding the page she's been looking for and scowling at a diagram. He wonders if he's really listening to her, but then she adds, “we could go to that shelter where my dad took me in tenth grade to adopt Herschel.”

“Yeah?” Peter can't help but break into a grin.

“Sure.” She turns to look at him again, the frown gone from her face.

MJ leans back a little and it hits Peter just how close they're sitting. Her eyes are half closed with tiredness now, and she's been biting her bottom lip. His breath catches in his throat as he, almost involuntarily, leans a fraction closer. He's pretty sure his heart is going to beat out of his chest as MJ leans in a little too, both of them nervous and uncertain, afraid to break from the stability and routine of their current lives. Afraid that this might mean an end to six years of friendship, and end to eating Chinese food on the weekends in their pyjamas, to crashing the libraries at colleges  to study together, to stupid things like grocery shopping and squashing their faces into frame to facetime Ned together.  

But MJ is in front of him, a second away from closing this endless distance between them, and he thinks that she might be the most beautiful person he's ever met, and god, he doesn't want to live with the regret of _not_ doing this. He’s almost died too many times for this. He knows the exact weight of regret - could recite it to a thousand decimal places.

He's the one to close the gap. It doesn't seem real at first, something that he's thought about doing for so long. Maybe even since they moved in together at the start of junior year, after MJ’s old roommate went on her year abroad. MJ’s lips are soft against his and she tastes like orange juice. He brings his hand up to rest on her cheek, hers landing on his shoulder, and he's _kissing Michelle._ He's kissing the fifteen-year-old, drawing him in detention class and the seventeen-year-old, talking him down from a panic attack, the twenty-year-old who he rings in the new year with and watches the sun rise on January the first from a rooftop. He's kissing the twenty-two-year-old who falls asleep on his shoulder and steals his sweaters.

The kiss doesn’t last longer than ten seconds, but somehow, to Peter, it lasts an hour and a fraction of a second all at once. MJ breaks the kiss, pulling away slowly, hand still in place on his shoulder, so he leaves his where it was too, cupping her face. Her eyes are wide open now, the widest he's seen them for the three days she's been holed up on the couch, surrounded by books. So this is it. She's going to stand up and walk away and this is how their friendship crashes and burns.

“I-” Peter loses his nerve, pulls his hand away, folding it with his other hand in his lap. MJ’s is gone in a second, and he sees something like disappointment cross her features. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t have the words.

When he was fighting Thanos, alongside the avengers, they weren’t alone. There was a rag-tag crew of actual _space_ people. (“ _Like in Star Wars_ ?” Ned had asked excitedly, later, in the quiet. “Kind of,” Peter had replied, through the pain.) One of them, her name was Mantis, was able to convey feelings with a simple touch, to tell what you were feeling or to make you feel something specific. Right now, he wants Mantis to be standing in front of him, to touch his forehead and _feel_. He’s pretty sure that Mantis feels enough emotions to know the names of all of them, to know exactly how to describe each unique combination of feelings. Failing that, she could probably just hold onto Peter’s feelings and give them to MJ, or something like that.

But the fact of the matter is, there’s no one else here. It’s just Peter and MJ, two soon-to-be-college-graduates with some mixed up feelings and a cold war of heavy silence. The rain persists, and the antique clock that MJ had bought at the beginning of this year, when they spent a Saturday dipping in and out of Cambridge’s antique stores, continues to tick.

“Peter, I think…” MJ trails off.

Damn it. He’s twenty-two. He’s spiderman. He can do this. “MJilikeyoualot.”

“Huh?”

“MJ,” his hand twitches, aching to take her own. He goes with it, reaching across and slowly picking up one of her hands, linking their fingers, resting on her knee. “I like you. I’ve liked you for… I don’t even know how long,” out of nowhere, he’s laughing. He isn’t sure why. MJ’s looking at him like he’s speaking in a different language. Peter’s pretty sure that this was a mistake, this whole thing. This whole thing that started in sophomore year of high school. Six years of mistake.

He doesn’t regret a second.

“You’re my best friend, tied with Ned,” he continues, capturing her dark eyes, her unreadable expression. “I didn’t want to wreck that,” he shrugs. “But I need you to know, now, and if you - if you think it’s weird now, or...I totally understand. We don’t have to live together in New York. Just… just, you just had to know. I had to make sure you knew.”

There’s another beat of unbearable silence, and then MJ does something that Peter wasn’t expecting. Something that never crossed his mind in any kind of imagined scenario. She reaches for him with her free hand and kisses him again.

This time it’s different. This time it’s hunger and passion and swollen lips, six years of lost time, far too many near death experiences. It’s MJ patching Peter up at two a.m the night he got stabbed, it’s Peter holding MJ’s hands on the way back to New York when her dad was rushed to hospital in freshman year, it’s the month-long relationship MJ was in with a TA two years ago that quietly hurt Peter more than any stabbing. It’s a culmination of tiny moments, formed into his hands on her back, hers lost in his hair. Their teeth knock together clumsily. They break apart with laughter.

“I’m sorry,” Peter laughs, running his fingers through his hair, straightening it out.

“Little rusty there, spiderman?” MJ asks, raising her eyebrows.

“That was your fault.”

“I don’t know. You can’t have been kissing many girls if you’ve been crushing on me for six years,” MJ teases. There’s a balled up piece of paper on the edge of the coffee table, so Peter throws it at MJ in retaliation. She catches it, scrunching it up further, and it seems to remind her that it’s past one in the morning and she has to be up in approximately six hours. Her eyes dart back to the textbooks.

“Oh. I should...” Peter gestures vaguely towards his bedroom, reluctant to stand up and leave MJ to it. Partly because he knows she probably won’t go to bed, she’ll just fall asleep on her books right here, and partly because he wants to talk about this.

How’s he supposed to sleep after something happening that he’s been wondering about for years? How’s he supposed to relax when he doesn’t know if this was a one time thing or whether MJ wants to be his girlfriend? His heart picks up again at just the thought of that. Of being able to kiss her every day, or falling asleep with her and being able to look each other in the eye in the morning.

“Peter.” MJ reaches for his elbow, stopping him before he can move. “I… I mean, same. Me too.”

“Huh?” Peter thinks he gets where she’s going, but if she’s willing to talk about this, he’s going to seek a concrete answer. He doesn’t dare hope.

“ _Me too_ ,” she gestures between them. Peter’s staring at her with a blank expression. “You’re going to make me say it?” She tips her head back for a second. “Ok, fine. I like you too. I _like you_. As in, I wanna make out with you and hold your hand and all the rest of it,” she waves her hand in circles in the air.

“You do?” Peter’s voice has risen several octaves.

“Right now, yes. Not if you keep asking me,” she captures his hand, squeezing it tight.

“Oh, I can stop. I can stop asking you,” he says hurriedly, squeezes her hand back.

“I should study more,” MJ says quietly.

“You should go to sleep,” Peter counters, standing up and trying to pull MJ up with their still joined hands. His phone is heavy in his pyjama pocket, and he’s thinking about calling Ned right now and telling him what just happened. Ned’s known about Peter’s crush since senior year of high school, rooting for them this entire time. He reaches into his pocket with his phone for his free hand.

“Nope,” MJ’s staring at her flashcards again.

“Huh?”

“You were going to call Leeds.”

“ _What_?” Peter’s worried that MJ has some kind of mind reading power that she hasn’t told him about.

“You call him after every minor life event.”

“MJ, this wasn’t minor,” he tells her without thinking about it, worrying straight after about whether he should be playing it cool. But not many people know him as well as she does, and cool isn’t a word she’d associate with him, he’s sure. Plus, he straight up loves her, and he wants her to know.  

“Dork,” she says, but she’s smiling at her flashcards. The rain is still falling outside, washing the city clean. “Quiz me one more time? Then I’ll go to sleep.”

He doesn’t believe her, but she’s nervous, and exhausted, and gripping onto his hand for dear life, so he swoops down and takes the cards, sits back down on their familiar couch, leans back, and begins to read question one. This time it’s different, because Peter guesses he’s allowed to touch her now, so he tugs his hand free of hers, and wraps his arm around her shoulders.

MJ’s asleep on his shoulder five minutes after she answers all of the flashcard questions correctly. Peter kisses her forehead, breathing in the floral scent of her shampoo and wondering if tonight really happened or if it was all a post-finals induced hallucination. Either way, he lets his eyes close slowly, lulled to sleep by raindrops and MJ’s arm around his waist.

The next day, MJ aces her final and then asks Peter to be her boyfriend. He says yes and starts to look at cats online, Ross Geller be damned.

He’s pretty sure that adulthood is going to be ok.

**Author's Note:**

> This is un-beta'd and also I wrote it very quickly so there may be a couple of errors in there!
> 
> Comments and kudos sustain me. Please feel free to come yell about these nerds with me on my tumblr @jakelovesamy


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